I tried to reinstall the MS dashboard on a larger HD the wrong way... long story short, I get an error 21 on both drives that I have - retail and upgrade. I was wondering if anyone would be able to provide me with the retail HD contents?

Check out Slayer's 2.6 final. The bittorrent file is at the usual places.

I've got slayers 2.6 and I've got auto-installer 3.0. I've tried the contents of slayers with xboxhdm v1.9 with no success (maybe I'm using the contents wrong? I know how to use HDM, I've done it a bunch of times before) but the slayers C drive stuff seems pretty straight forward. I got an error 21 when I tried the slayers stuff.

any thoughts?

Do you still have your exploitable game? Coldboot the disc, run the save, uninstall the softmod then reinstall it.